Uziwa’umande felt the ground against her paws as she ran after the Thompson’s gazelle she had decided to make her dinner. In her short few weeks on her own her natural predatory instincts had kicked in and she had begun to hunt on her own instead of simply bullying the vulture for their already half eaten carcasses. She was still very terrible at it, but was improving on a slow steady basis. She could feel it as she ran; her muscles were becoming stronger than they once were from her life in captivity. She had also grown slightly bulkier because of her muscle gain; her once slender looking body was thicker and made her a little more intimidating.
The gazelle was managing to keep a nice distance between itself and Uziwa; she didn’t blame it though. She sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to be made into someone’s dinner, regardless of whether or not it was the natural order of things. That was one thing she never understood in her captivity; exactly why those she once knew as her family continued to feed her what she would have caught in the wild instead of attempting to make her eat things like grass and twigs. Her two-legged family ate those things on occasion, sometimes giving up their own meat in order to feed her. It made her feel like a burden sometimes. Not that it mattered now…
Uziwa knew she couldn’t keep up this chase for much longer. She was beginning to tire and the strength that was once in her legs way beginning to wane quickly. She wasn’t sure whether or not she was going to lose her kill for the day; she was hoping she wouldn’t. The last thing she wanted was to go back to searching for a half-eaten and slightly decomposing carcass in order to feed from again. She always felt so sick afterwards and wondered how exactly the scavenging birds were able to deal with the fact that their food source was so poor, not that she ever bothered to ask them.
Giving it one last shot, Uziwa gave a hearty push with her legs to propel her forward in order to grab hold of the gazelle. She was unable to get on top of the prey animal and instead craned out her neck, snapping at the animals legs managing to n** the back of one of them causing the gazelle to topple overtop of itself and roll into the ground. Uziwa dug her legs into the dirt in order to slow herself and gained ground on the gazelle, quickly finding herself towering over the crippled looking beast.
A sigh of relief ran over her as she grabbed the struggling animal’s throat in her jaws and suffocated her kill, the poor animal’s eyes turning deadpan in a mere matter of moments. She still wasn’t used to the fact that she was now her own hunter, taking the lives of others in order to feed herself instead of someone else doing it for her. It was more than a little bit surreal at times to her.
Uziwa didn’t waste any time digging into her kill. Now that she was living in the rogue lands on her own she learned the art of eating her food quickly, no longer being able to afford the luxury of eating slowly and savoring her meal. With her still being smaller than an adult hyena she was still susceptible to having her kill stolen from her by lions, leopards, cheetahs and even other hyenas if they wished to do so; the hard reminders that she no longer had the cushy life as the pet of her two-legged beasts.
Uziwa could feel her stomach begin to expand as she gorged herself on the kill she had before her. That was another feeling she had never experienced before. While she was always fed back when she was still living among the two-legged, she was never over fed, and never knew the feeling of literally feeling stuffed. The first time she actually engorged herself on meat she passed out in a nearby bush, unable to move herself. She had been certain she tore open her stomach by eating some much, but the fact she was still alive when she awoke was an obvious indicator she had not torn her stomach open. Now there was barely any pain when she gorged. Her stomach had been stretched out enough where she was able to ingest the amount of food necessary in order to keep her sustained until she made another successful kill.
It hadn’t taken long for the scavengers and pests to find their way to Uziwa and her meal. Thankfully for her she was just about done with it anyway, feeling that anything left on the bones of the gazelle weren’t worth fighting a wild dog or buzzard over considering her apparent bloat at the moment. Backing away, she handed the kill over to the animals closing in around her and turned to make short work of increasing the gap between her and than. She may have grown some, but she was still an adolescent taking on fully-fledged and seasoned adults. Even with her brawn she’d surely fall victim to them, or in the more likely scenario, be bullied for a while before they got tired of her whimpering.
Regardless of which outcome would come to fruition, Uziwa didn’t allow it to happen and now had a nice big gap between her and what was once her meal. She tried her best to move as quickly as she could but the weight of her stomach was making it hard for her to move very quickly and she quickly found herself tiring. As soon as Uziwa could spot something akin to shelter, she decided that she would rest, hoping that the contents of her stomach would ease themselves and stop pushing to hard against the lining of her stomach. Now if she could only find the shelter.
It was another half an hour before Uziwa found anything that she felt was a suitable structure for her to take shade and safety under. Having live with her two-legged brethren for so long she had grown accustomed to the closed off structures they knew as their homes and was not adjusting well to sleeping out in the open in plain view of everyone and everything. She had spotted a tree and approached it. The tree had a large gap at the base, big enough for her to curl herself into, and she sniffed at it nervously. She had to make sure the scent left behind by its previous tenant wasn’t fresh. A fresh scent was usually an indicator that someone would be more than likely to return, a weak scent being ideal as that means the holding had been unoccupied for a number of days, if not weeks.
To Uziwa’s pleasure the scent left behind by the previous tenant was stale, not stale enough that it wasn’t there, but stale enough to her liking that the likelihood they’d show back up that evening was minimal at best. Quickly scooting herself into the confines of the cubbyhole she was going to call her resting place, Uziwa made herself comfortable. She curled, much as the Wild Dogs did when they slept together, and ended up draping her head over her thigh as she began to doze off to sleep. Her stomach squirmed slightly in unrest and she scowled at it, her eyes shut off to the world. After several minutes of this, Uziwa growled at it, as if commanding her stomach to stop its misbehavior, and oddly enough it agreed, resting as she did. It didn’t take her long to doze off from there, unimpeded sleep.
Word Count: 1295
